I've written about Brazil pre-Lula and post-Lula and spent the last five years covering all aspects of the country for Dow Jones, Wall Street Journal and Barron's. Meanwhile, for an undetermined amount of time, and with a little help from my friends, I will be parachuting primarily into Brazil, Russia, India and China. But will also be on the look out for interesting business stories and investing ideas throughout the emerging markets.

Has Public Opinion Really Changed Regarding Gun Control?

Iconic "flower power" photograph by Pulitzer Prize Winning photojournalist Bernie Boston. Americans only seem to be more anti-gun these days, but in reality, over time, the majority are in favor of the keeping gun laws as they are. That doesn't mean some sort of tweaking is in the works, however, especially regarding assault weapons.

Americans may be more willing to accept gay marriage these days at the polls, but on a couple hot button issues, the country remains as divided as ever.

Over the last several years, the only social issues that seemed to matter to voters were whether gays should be allowed to marry, or whether or not the Supreme Court should overturn Roe v. Wade, the law that made abortion legal. Today, the biggest social issue is gun violence, and the Second Amendment right that allows Americans to own all kinds guns, including powerful military style carbines like the Smith & Wessen M&P15 semi-automatic and Bushmasters used in recent public shootings.

Gun violence stepped onto center stage on Dec. 1, when Kansas City Chiefs Linebacker Jovan Belcher shot his girlfriend, Kassandra Perkins, to death after returning home in a drunken stupor. The next day, Belcher turned the same gun on himself and committed suicide in front of his coaches. Sports talk radio couldn’t get enough of the story, and then on Sunday Night Football Dec. 2, long-time sports commentator Bob Costas blamed the mix of sports and gun culture for what went down the night before. Quoting a former Kansas City Star sports columnist named Jason Whitlock, Costas said that “hand guns do not enhance our safety. They exacerbate our flaws. If Jovan Belcher didn’t possess a gun, he and Kassandra Perkins would both be alive today.”

The right wing media went into a frizzy. Fox News radio firebrands called for Bob Costas to be fired. Our gun debate was off and running after a long pause from a summer shooting spree at a Colorado movie theater.

Ironically, Whitlock was the one critical about guns. Costas just repackaged his words and put them in front of a larger audience. And, even more ironically, Whitlock works for Fox Sports.

For what it’s worth, the sports world got America talking about guns after a six month hiatus from the subject. We seem to care about gun violence only when it is a media spectacle, and that always requires a huge body count. Belcher’s murder-suicide wasn’t a massacre, but it made gun violence the water cooler talk for nearly every man, and surely every sports fan, in the United States.

The massacre came two weeks later, on Dec. 14, in Newtown, Conn., the Sandy Hook Elementary School murder-suicide took the gun story from the sports talk to everybody talk. And now as a result of Sandy Hook, Americans are clamoring for something to be done about assault weapons.

With a ban at least appearing imminent, Americans from Maine to Texas are rushing to buy Bushmasters.

Looked at over a period of time, Americans view on gun control remains rather stagnant. In fact, opinions on gun control from 1993 to 2012 show that it’s nearly a dead heat between those who want to control gun ownership, and those who want to protect it.

At the start of the Bill Clinton administration in 1993, 57 percent of Americans polled by the Pew Research Center said it was very important to control gun ownership. That rose to a whopping 66 percent in favor of stricter gun control by the time he left office in 2000. It remained relatively stable even throughout the eight years of President George W. Bush.

Only when Obama took over did the mood start to change. It went from 60 percent in favor of gun control to just 49 percent. In 2012, it was a minority of 47 percent in favor of stricter gun laws and 46 percent in favor of the status quo.

Recent gun violence have had little impact in swaying the public, despite the outrage at the time of their occurrence.

Shortly after the “Batman shooting” in Aurora, Colo on July 20, 2012, a minority 48 percent wanted stricter gun control and 52 percent wanted to protect gun owners’ rights in a poll taken a week after the movie theater shooting that killed 12 people watching a midnight viewing of “The Dark Knight Rises”. While that interest in gun control did rise from a similar poll taken in April of that same year, it rose from around 45 percent in favor of stricter gun laws.

Polls can be tricky. We’re a fickle bunch. A lot depends on the questioning.

According to a series of CBS News polls asking if gun control laws should be made more strict, less strict or stay the same, 53 percent said it should be more strict when asked in the first week of February. That number remained within the margin of error from a similar poll taken in the first two weeks of January by CBS, with 54 percent saying they were in favor of stricter gun laws. Just after Sandy Hook, those in favor was 59 percent.

It’s been falling ever since.

If this keeps up, Americans will likely be where they were in April 2012, when only 39 percent said gun laws should be stronger; 41 percent said they should be kept as they are and 13 percent said they should be loosened further.

Guns n’ Babies

Aside from the recent debate on assault weapons, America’s long time favorite social issue is abortion. According to a recent NBC News/WSJ poll, more Americans are in favor of keeping Roe v. Wade in tact.

The poll has 70 percent of Americans saying they’re against overtuning Roe v. Wade, including 57 percent who said they felt strongly about it. The numbers polled in favor of keeping the status quo is up from the 58 percent who felt that way in 1989; 60 percent who said so in 2002; and 66 percent in 2005. According to the poll, only 24 percent want the Roe v. Wade decision scrapped.

That doesn’t mean Americans like abortion. They don’t. And increasingly so.

When asked if to describe themselves as pro-life or pro-choice, those who say they are pro-life has risen since the Clinton years. In 1995, just 33 percent of those polled described themselves as pro-life. It rose to 50 percent as of 2012. By the same token, 56 percent said they were pro-choice in 1995, falling to 41 percent currently.

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“high-powered assault rifles used by law enforcement and the U.S. Marines”

First, assault rifles are not “high powered”. High power as a modifier of a rifle refers to the energy of the bullet leaving the barrel, not whether is scares a liberal when he looks at a picture of the gun. M-16 and AR-15 rifles, the “assault rifles” the phrase is presumably trying to refer to, are carbine caliber weapons with much lower energies than full rifle rounds. A bolt action deer rifle is a high powered rifle, an AR-15 is not. It is illegal to hunt deer with them in many states because the round is considered underpowered to put down a deer with a single hit, humanly. The military does use some specifically high powered rifles in a few applications (snipers e.g.), but the standard infantry small arm is not a “high powered” rifle, but a specifically low powered carbine. The military prefers carbines because their ammunition is lighter and this allows soldiers to carry more rounds, and because the military has specialized heavier weapons for use at longer ranges, and only needs its infantry small arms to cover a moderate distance window, out to about 300 yards – and carbines suffice for that.

Next there is the implicit claim that the Marines and police use the same assault rifles, when they don’t. The military uses fully automatic versions of these weapons, true “machine guns” that fire repeatedly as long as the trigger is held down. The very term “assault rifle” refers to carbines with that characteristic, which originated as a compromise between full rifles for long range and especially defensive shooting, and submachineguns of pistol caliber that were considered superior at the close ranges involved in military assaults, meaning attempts by one side’s infantry forces to advance directly on top of positions occupied by enemy soldiers. That is where the “assault” in “assault rifle” comes from.

In WW II, armies used submachineguns for that assault role. But their pistol caliber rounds had very short range. They used full rifles for defense at longer ranges, but those were not fully automatic. The assault rifle was invented late in WW II as a specific compromise between the range of a rifle and the full automatic capability of a submachinegun. That is the only item to which the term “assault rifle” properly applies.

The police do not use assault rifles so defined, because they use semiautomatic versions of these weapons – the same available to civilians. Fully automatic weapons have been restricted in civilian hands (effectively banned, other than some grandfathered items) since 1934.

So — Marines and police do not use the same items; the items used by police and under discussion in present legislation are not assault rifles; assault rifles themselves are not high powered.

The factual inaccuracy the media displays on these matters is simply incredible. If they got other news stories this wrong, they’d be reporting on nuclear testing in Burma and the resignation of the Dali Llama…

“Today, the biggest social issue is gun violence, and the Second Amendment right that allows Americans to own all kinds guns, including high-powered assault rifles used by law enforcement and the U.S. Marines.”

The author is either knowingly lying or is totally incompetent. Months into this debate, EVERYONE knows that semi-automatic replicas of fully automatic military assault rifles – so called “military-style” assault weapons or “machine guns”, are not used by entities such as the US Marines. A fool or a lier – what can we believe from a Contributor covering Brazil, Russia, India and China, who simply has an anti-gun opinion, a pen and a publisher?

ER: Oh yeah – the enthusiasm gap. Like all those people who wanted Romney to win but didn’t get out and vote. Perhaps Romney should be President based on the people who didn’t contribute to his campaign or vote for him?

Quite the incredulous strategy from the anti-gun crowd. The lack of funding and silence from those who support gun control is OVERWHELMING PROOF that the will of the American people supports gun control.

Even if 51% of Americans supported banning of guns – that means nothing. Do recall that the US Constitution protects the minority from the will of the majority.

The main stream media has been pushing gun control. Pierce Morgan has latched onto it like Nancy Grace did with Casey Anthony. Night after night after night. These shootings are horrific. Most of the shooters are on psychiatric drugs They mention mental illness in the equation, but sidestep the drug angle. Don’t want to offend the big drug companies who spend billions of dollars on advertising. They go on about the girl who attended the inauguration and killed in Chicago a week later. Chicago, the murder capital of the country with the highest gun crime, AND the strictest gun laws. The problem is, many of these criminals commit crimes with guns and are turned back out on the street. Only when they kill someone does anything happen. In Florida we have 10, 20, life. If you possess a gun during a crime you get ten years, If you display the gun during the crime you get twenty. If you shoot it or shoot at someone, you get life. Now that’s a gun law that makes sense. Check out some facts about these guns, not what the main stream media is feeding you. http://www.guncite.com/gun_control_gcassaul.html

The second amendment does grant you the right to own an assault rifle. Even so, the federal government outlawed them in 1986 with the Hughes Amendment.

Other than a few wording issues, I think this article is about as unbiased as it can get on a hot topic such as this one. So good job.

One thing I really did not like about this article was that you put up statistics from a relatively unbiased and reputable polling site (Pew Research Center). Then you said that polls are finicky and try to counter it with fairly biased and less reputable polling sites like CBS, NBC, and WSJ. The way you said it makes it seem like CBS, NBC, and WSJ are more reputable. In general you should avoid statistics from these sites. These site generally only poll a select group of people, such as their readers, which creates a mostly unusable statistic.

Also the graphic “Increasingly Gun Shy?” is very off the mark. You should not use it. Either that or half of the people in all the polls they took don’t even know what a gun is. Assault-style weapons are a subclass of semi-automatic weapons, so how could less Americans want to ban assault-style weapons than semi-automatic ones.

Also I don’t like the statistic on abortion, they fail to include people like me. I am strongly pro-life in my personally views, but I believe the government should be pro-choice. I do not believe I have the right to dictate to others what they should do.

Looks like a number of Americans have become little sheep. Following just want the liberal media and government wants you to do and believe. It doesn’t matter if we lose a few constitutional rights…..right? If you open that door, there is no turning back for what other rights they will take.

Wake up before you have no rights at all. When the criminals, federal and state agencies put down their guns, I might put down mine…..but I doubt it. I believe in the second amendment and you should also. You want my legal guns….try and take them.

BTW New York…….are you really going to allow Bloomberg tell you how many ounces of sugary drinks you can consume? Turn your back to this, next it will be your New York style pizza. Lol What a joke! Like Bloomberg really gives a crap about your health! If he did, you would only be allowed to have salad and tofu but that might be in his future plans. Cuomo and Bloomberg….great comedians!

I don’t understand why people who have stock in the arms industry in our country don’t seem to be afraid of being targeted by sociopaths like Adam Lanza and others. Wayne LaPierre and his group, as well as gun manufacturers and investors seem confident that they are safe. Perhaps it’s because they are armed that they feel this confidence and perhaps they believe that only the defenseless, civilians and children need fear armed psychopaths.

As a service to fairness and openness, and equal treatment for all, perhaps publishing the names of arms manufacturers and their investors would help to convince certain gun-rights advocates that background checks and limits on magazine capacity might not be such a bad idea after all. Why should they, of all people feel safe in our gun-crazy culture?